About improving icons alignment, you’re right. I’ve seen that when make the test view for your issue (I don’t use icons theme). As I have worked on grey theme and have just make minor tweaks on darktable.css file (pull request not published at this time), I will see If I could make something better for this.

About font too heavy for you, if it’s on darktable.css theme, that’s the minor tweaks I’ve made so that would be better when I will publish my pull request. If it’s on darktable-elegant themes, please publish a screen capture. On these themes, heavy font could not be possible normally.

I found the left panel kinda awkward. The icons and fields of the collect module feel weird, and big. In the image information, it’s the same, everything looks quite big (again this is just a feeling, I love the slick look and I’m sure I’ll be able to tweak all this stuff to my taste). There is some funky stuff still going on with the font (look at the date time field). And finally have a look at the difference in size from this panel compared to the year in the very nice histogram below the lighttable. This looks like the size I have in my terminal.

What do you think ? Does that look normal for you ? Or is there something dodgy going on.

Your side panels seems small. Maybe your reduce their size too much. That could be change on preferences. By default it’s 350px, personally I use 320px, less make especially the left panel to condensed. By contrast, that could be seen bigger. That’s the only thing remaining that I see.

Only arrow icon on collect module remain quite big on the new UI (probably something to improve but by this time I’ve search a little how without success). The other icon is big only if side panel width is under 300px for the little tests I’ve just made on my system.

For other things, think about compare your views with screens capture from Aurélien on start of this thread or on my thread about grey css.

Hi, as I’ve update css yesterday and it’s now merge on master, could you please update to last revision and test it. On your suggestion, i’ve made vertical alignment on icons module. As the height is related to label, It seems not possible to adjust height on other buttons like on/off one with just css. The difference is quite small and I don’t think would be a priority for devs by now.

Squeeze as much text as possible in as little space as possible (with respect to legibility) to respect 1.

Take advantage of high DPI screens (HD 1080, 2.5 K and 4 K)

Ensure that controls (buttons, etc.) look different than labels (info, titles, etc.) and are easily distinguishable.

Make the current control stands out from the others (because it gets the keyboard focus).

Pascal_Obry:

Now, one can certainly use a 1024x900 screen with dt and have just a thumb size central area. is that a good user experience?

Do we have enough energy to work on supporting screen resolution that cannot support proper picture editing? We are in 2019 where HD screen certainly not a high requirement for photographs.

It’s good that dt tries to serve users with limited means and below average gear, but at some point, photography is a graphic art and needs proper tools to be done properly, including a proper screen. An HD 720 screen and below is not a proper graphic arts tool. dt is a raw photographs processor, raw photographs mainly come out of 350 € and counting cameras, so if users don’t have another 120-150 € to spend on a decent screen, let’s call them irrational human beings with an illed-designed graphic chain.

But this question bissects with:

“are we doing a photo software for IT guys doing some photography on the side or are we doing a photo software for actual photographers ?”.

I’m working to make dt a professional tool because enthusiasts are not the crowd that makes a soft progress, and enthusiast users are more willing to accept the complexity of an advanced soft once they have seen what the pros are able to get from it (#Photoshop).

darix:

While waiting we can work on making it work better on fullhd again i have the feeling on my T420 screen that I lost a lot of editing space

Pascal_Obry:

I agree, as I said already we need a condensed theme. I hope we’ll see that happening before the next major release.

The current one is already supposed to be condensed. Have you checked the DPI settings in darktablerc and Gnome screen scaling factor ? In darktablerc, it should be set to -1 (system default), and in Gnome, it should be set to whatever suits you (be carefull, in Gnome Tweaks, to set the font scaling factor to 1.00).

Sorry for not getting back to you earlier. I’ve pulled the latest master and there are a few things that are really weird.
I’m getting 3 times out of 4 a seg fault a few seconds following the startup like this :Magick: abort due to signal 11 (SIGSEGV) "Segmentation Fault"... Abort trap: 6
When it does not crash, the icons are still misaligned. I’m starting to think that there might be another old css somewhere that it must use… But I’m cleaning stuff before each build so I’m not sure.

First few times it ran, I had the date and time displayed correctly in the lighttable, but after 3 of 4 crashes, the Japanese-like symbols came back.
2nd preview window is still showing the selected picture full screen, but when it’s done rendering, it shows the (rendered) picture with half size, so taking up 1/4 of the space available…
Not more luck on the openCL side of things, still unable to compile lut3d.cl even after 15 restarts…

A lot is going on and as a result I’m unable to use the sw right now

@aurelienpierre Would you know what font size is used to display the year in the histogram below the lighttable ? Would you also know the size used to display the image information for instance ? Just trying to make sense of what I see on my screen…

First thing : it’s impossible that all issues you see are from darktable code. I follow regularly pull request and issues posted on Github, I’m on the main site and french forum about darktable and here, I never see that. Icons are normally not misaligned (I change as I’ve said alignment of iop icons. I have even made these last days new corrections and improvements from other issues I see (doesn’t include icons alignment) and this was follow by some people and corrected many things. I have also made myself for that quite a lot of tests (with a quite rainy week-end from last one, I have spend some time). And like for previous time, for interface issues, a capture screen is better.

Also, I don’t understand how you could have these “japanese-like” symbols. So, on what you describe, two possibilities I see : compiling issues on your system or MacOs issues. And for that, only developers who use MacOs could help and I’m not sure but they are one or two if I remember (except erdgadoh, don’t know who).

What I’m sure is, on Linux at least, all issues you described doesn’t exist (at least on my OS but from what I see, no one else describe that).

I will respond to question you asked to @aurelienpierre as I also works on css so really know it great. Text font sizes you are emphasis (all), those you ask are on main value=1em, so the real size is related to default font size used (OS one for darktable.css, Roboto or next one used for elegant themes).

Ok, first and foremost, please let me apologise for my previous message. As I’m reading it again, I’m realising just now how it sounds and I’m sorry about that. I’m grateful that this software exists and for all the hardwork that you guys are putting upfront to make it even better.

My frustration got the upside of things (and yes maybe the rain helped also) and I didn’t mean to criticise the software. I’m facing too many little issues so I’m certain it’s on me. I need to figure out why this is happening so I can learn how to fix it.

Now there are positive things. As it turns out, Edgardoh pushed some changes that worked for me and the 2nd preview window, so that’s one thing . I’m getting less crash than yesterday (absolutely no idea why and if someone would like to know more maybe I can run some kind of command that I don’t know about to have a log of what’s going on ? I don’t know). The openCL thing is more annoying because it’s very slow without it, even more I guess because of the resolution. I’ll focus on this first.

As for the css and font size etc, there is clearly something dodgy going on on my system as in I’m almost certain all your great work in the recent commits, I’m almost sure, somehow, is not being taken into account. Maybe this is because I have 2.6.2 alongside the master. I don’t know but this is why I said I need to understand so I can fix it. The only aim of my previous message was a callout to anybody who’s been through the same on Mac, if any (because there are fair chances that all these little things are Mac specific) and who could advise about what I should try next.

Again, sorry, and please keep up the great work while I try to catch up on things

Ok, first and foremost, please let me apologise for my previous message. As I’m reading it again, I’m realising just now how it sounds and I’m sorry about that. I’m grateful that this software exists and for all the hardwork that you guys are putting upfront to make it even better.

My frustration got the upside of things (and yes maybe the rain helped also) and I didn’t mean to criticise the software. I’m facing too many little issues so I’m certain it’s on me. I need to figure out why this is happening so I can learn how to fix it.

As for the css and font size etc, there is clearly something dodgy going on on my system as in I’m almost certain all your great work in the recent commits, I’m almost sure, somehow, is not being taken into account.

Normally for managing fonts, fontconfig is used. Fontconfig has a system and a user config file where you can define which fonts should be used as fallback if a symbol in a font is not available. It might be that you have installed a Japanese font which is used as fallback! This means you need to configure your system correctly!

I’ll check that but I have never installed such a font. In fact I’ve bought my mac 3 months ago and still trying to find my way around. There is very little to no customization on this machine.

I did install on the other hand all the Roboto fonts, and am using MacPorts to compile the master.

What I discover last night while trying with the GTK debug tool is that for instance, the left panel seems to be using a font size at 1em, but it is not. If I change this interactively using the GTK debugger from 1 to 0.99, there it all adjusts and the font size looks on par with my resolution, which was not the case before.
A consequence of that is the misalignment of the icons (using the icon theme) that i could still see. Somehow they are centered IF the font size is 1em (which is the case when I set 0.99).

To give an idea, once I’ve adjusted the size in the GTK debugger tool, I cannot go to the previous size it was using unless I fiddle more with the value. I find that the 1.4 param is roughly reflecting what I see when I compile the latest master and just start DT with any of the theme.

I’m planning on opening an issue to give maybe more details and screenshots, but I can’t do that now. In short, the 1em fontsize value is somehow not taken into account, and it falls back on something else which looks similar to 1.4em. How and why, no idea yet, I4m just reporting what I see.

As for the japenese symbol I have no idea, but I’ll provide screenshots like I said.

Congratulations to the great advances in the UI! Maybe this could be as opportunity to tackle an issue which might be taboo, but here it goes. Could there be an option in the preferences to render module names and general interface in Title Case instead of lowercase ? I happen to read better and quicker if my eyes find the first letter in Title Case. UI.

I happen to read better and quicker if my eyes find the first letter in Title Case

For me it’s all about shape recognition. A more concise capitalised title is far easier to read as it has a more distinct shape. If I have to stop and actually read the titles it takes a lot longer and I end up with eye strain a lot sooner. But not everyone will agree…

I mentioned before about being able to edit the module titles but it wasn’t really picked up on. But capitalising is only half the key and maybe there should be a module names file to load a users prefered names.

Fact is changing this would be an earthquake on the code and will invalidate all translations. So I suppose we certainly want some automatic tools to handle that. But I’m wondering if CSS has an option to capitalize, lower or upper-case labels? Not sure, but if this is possible then for sure we will avoid the earthquake and we could see this happening sooner than later or… never!